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grrlscientist writes "Common Ravens have been shown to express empathy towards a 'friend' or relative when they are distressed after an aggressive conflict — just like humans and chimpanzees do. But birds are very distant evolutionary relatives of Great Apes, so what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?"

They did. Open up USC, select Installed Software, search for and select Empathy and press the remove button.Once that's finished, select Get New Software, search for Pidgin, select Pidgin Internet Messenger and press the Install button.

Yeah I've used that before, can't remember why I didn't stick with it. Probably lack of animated emotes, or inconsistency with them displaying on other people's machines. I use aMSN at the moment. The main interface is pretty strange (click a menu then mouse-over another and the original menu stays open), but it's got lots of good features and plugins.

Yeah. I'm not scientist, but I do dabble in this, and it's not surprising; a lot of the birds, including crows, ravens, and the parrot show strong cognitive abilities, even though they are "are very distant evolutionary relatives of Great Apes."

In fact a lot of animals not close to our own species have been shown to have strong cognitive abilities, these birds for example, and cetaceans, especially dolphins.

Yes, but it means the underlying mechanisms for toolmaking, empathy, etc, were all present no later than the last common ancestor. If a given animal does not have these traits, then the same sections of the brain are presumably used for some other function(s) as well - function(s) more advantageous to those other animals.

It also means that the underlying mechanisms are truly primitive and cannot involve any part of the brain not common to humans and avians. This means basic skills (such as toolmaking, basic

Or it's just a matter of convergent evolution. There's no reason that the "underlying mechanisms" (which, of course, we're a long way from figuring out) couldn't have evolved twice, or more. Empathy seems to me like a survival trait in social animals. Although I hold out hope for AI over the long term, I think it's a dangerous assumption that the mechanisms are so simple we'll be able to simulate them with modern hardware.

It means the underlying mechanisms for toolmaking, empathy, etc, were all present no later than the last common ancestor.

Not necessarily. Some or all of them could be cases of convergent evolution. You are also too optimistic about our computing power. From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

The Artificial Intelligence System project implemented non-real time simulations of a "brain" (with 10^11 neurons) in 2005. It took 50 days on a cluster of 27 processors to simulate 1 second of a model. The Blue Brain project used one of the fastest supercomputer architectures in the world, IBM's Blue Gene platform, to create a real time simulation of a single rat neocortical column consisting of approximately 10,000 neurons and 10^8 synapses in 2006.

On top of that, in order to simulate these behaviors, we would first need to understand the "signal flow" that creates them within the brain. Brains are nothing like PCBs, and even our most advanced imaging tools don't give us the resolution we'd need to begin to understand at a more than rudimentary level what is going on. There are numerous other reasons w

I am extremely suspicious of "convergent evolution" in cases where there are multiple ways to perform the same general task. The probability of multiple generations converging rather than diverging should be infinitesimal. Convergent evolution does happen, but even there let's pause for thought. Dolphins and whales are descended from animals that moved back into the oceans. Their methods of controlling depth and pressure are unlike that of any fish. They have flukes, which are analogous to fins but do not o

Dolphins and whales are descended from animals that moved back into the oceans. Their methods of controlling depth and pressure are unlike that of any fish.

You're referring to swim bladders? Not all fish have those.

While there are differences in detail between a shark and a killer whale, overall they're quite similar. Enough that I'd go "OMGWTFHaaalp!" if I was in the water and saw either of them coming towards me.

One time in Malaysia with my family we stopped our car at a tourist spot and noticed that a monkey had been killed by another vehicle, probably quite recently. Another monkey stood on the road beside the dead body thumping its hands onto the top of its head in an expression of obvious grief.

We got out of the car and I stepped into a crowd of agitated primates, all about 40cm high. The tension between us was clear and frankly terrifying for me. I walked off slowly, trying not to make sudden movements.

I had no doubt that there was empathy between all players in that situation.

One time in Malaysia with my family we stopped our car at a tourist spot and noticed that a monkey had been killed by another vehicle, probably quite recently. Another monkey stood on the road beside the dead body thumping its hands onto the top of its head in an expression of obvious grief.

We got out of the car and I stepped into a crowd of agitated primates, all about 40cm high. The tension between us was clear and frankly terrifying for me. I walked off slowly, trying not to make sudden movements.

I had no doubt that there was empathy between all players in that situation.

Why would you get out of a car, into a crowd of agitated primates, that are agitated because one of their own was killed by a car, not unlike the one you just got out of?

I think Monkeys are absolutely smart enough to know that the two vehicles are different versions of the same beast. Color, size, and shape might be different, but I am sure that they are able to realize the connection. Especially in an environment where it is probably very common for members of their social group to be run down by these noisy rubber footed behemoths.

I've seen the same thing with dogs and cats. I suspect that all mammals (and probably birds as well) have empathy, but we just don't know how to recognize it. And I've seen human beings who have a total and complete lack of empathy; they're called sociopaths. [wikipedia.org]

Our bodies are not the most strong, nor do we have fur. Yet, because of our intelligence and endurance, we can survive in the harshest of environments. Also, no other living organism has been able to engineer objects that can destroy life as well as harbor it on such vast scales. We've just about done it all. Everything from questioning our origin, splitting the atom, developing the computer, building space craft, to setting foot on the moon...etc. And w

What other multi-cellular species on this planet can dominate homo sapien? None.

But then again, what other species would put forth the very questions we ask of ourselves? We try so hard to study and understand other animals and the way (and what) they communicate. But for the most part, we end up with a bunch of living organisms that run off genetically scripted instincts.

1) You base your definition on domination, a variant of "survival of the fittest". Not exactly a good judge of intelligence, though a good judge of power.2) You assume that only humans ask themselves these questions.3) You assume that other animals don't study us.4) You assume that it's genetic, scripted, and instincts.

Well, yes. Unless I actually know otherwise, is starting off on an assumption a bad thing? At this point, it's all I know until informed otherwise. But my assumptions are based on our actions and from introspection.

I never implied I know the solution, only that there is a problem, which is this bias you mention here. It still remains important that we recognize that we may be wrong due to this bias, that we might not be all that we think we are..

But all of us live on the achievements of those before us. You and I by ourselves if dropped into a rainforest, a desert, or a beach with no one around would die quickly. I can neither build a fire, catch my food, make a shelter, know what herbs to eat, or stitch clothes. From that perspective I'm a loser who doesn't deserve to survive. I'm a freelance writer. Useless.

Maybe that's why our population keeps growing? Anyway we're doing pretty good; while the natural balance in the ecosystem is gone, humans are not killing it. OK maybe some species go extinct, but when was the last time you saw other species imbalance nature and persueing to fix the balance on their own?

Hell some humans are even trying to figure out how to create(/restore?) a livable ecosystem on Mars!

what elevates humankind over other animals is not grey matter, it's our vocal dexterity

take any of us, and remove our ability to talk or write, and we're pretty much a little smarter than your average raven or dolphin: we're isolated islands of thought. so we may get glimmers of brilliance now and then, but it fades, and is trapped in our skulls, and dies with us

or, give ravens and dolphins the ability to take the more complicated ideas in their heads, and share it with others with language, and this launches them to levels comparable with humanity in terms of what they can think. because now they build on each other's ideas, and nothing is forgotten: its passed and shared around, and babies are born in this sea of wisdom and thought, to build upon even more

thoughts don't matter. the ability to COMMUNICATE thoughts matters. that's what puts humanity in a genuine level orders of magnitude over other creatures on this planet

and when mankind developed writing? forget about it, game over, humanity vaults into the stratosphere (literally, around 1950, because of what writing makes possible). now, in fact, these silly biological shells hardly matter anymore. memetic evolution, the retention and sharing of ideas over generations, becomes the real story of change on this planet, and genetic evolution takes a back seat in terms of importance

eventually, the memes will shed these silly biological shells entirely, and shape the world and other worlds completely of its own volition. but it was us silly apes that gave birth to it, whatever it will be, memetically driven idea machine. and don't forget who your father is! you damn future godlike machine thingy

For obvious ethical reasons, the study would never happen. But, I've often wondered how a feral human being would act throughout its lifetime from child to adult (recorded and such). Would he or she come up with some advanced methods to trap animals? Would it understand the concept on its own of sharpening a stick to make spear? Just how innovative would a feral human be over that of any other primate or bird?

The tricky part is how to define a feral human to begin with. A human, completely isolated from birth, has as much change of survival as almost any other animal isolated from birth. (not quite true, there are plenty of creatures that manage to survive based on instincts alone, but those still have obscene death rates. But the general thought still applies). It would still need some form of care at birth.. but since humans learn from their parents, even during their subconscious states before their conscious

I agree on the ability to communicate, I disagree that vocalization is key. I think we may have come up with some sort of sign-language or language based on snaps/claps & rhythm if we lacked vocal chords.

If we lacked ear drums we would have been a dead species a very long time ago. "did you hear that, it sounded like a tiger coming to eat us" "no frank, i dont hear a god damn thing because I dont have ears, neither do you AAAAHHHHGGG Im being eaten!!!"

While the ravens are more limited than we are for communication (they cannot build libraries for example), they DO pass ideas to each other (as do other animals), probably by watching and then imitating.

Overall, I don't disagree since just watching and doing can only convey the concrete and our greatest accomplishments require the abstract as well.

I find your sig to be quite apt in this thread. Through IP laws, we are willfully limiting the very thing that makes us what we are. If taken to the extremes the corporations want, we would probably devolve.

What you express so boldly (and rather floridly as well) is perhaps what you learn from the more popular part of the scientific press; it is, however, not entirely correct.

what elevates humankind over other animals is not grey matter, it's our vocal dexterity

No, on two counts: Humans are not "elevated" over other animals, or "more highly evolved" or anything like that; and there is no single capability that sets us apart. The idea that we are somehow "the crown of creation" is simply a superstition from the past - we are animals, simply, and what sets us apart is that we have a set of traits

The best example of this that I've heard is in the story of Helen Keller. Since she didn't learn to communicate until age 7 or so, she could remember what life was like beforehand, describing her early mind as a chaotic mess of strange sensations. It was only after she learned language that she was able to have actual organized thoughts and think conceptually.

take any of us, and remove our ability to talk or write, and we're pretty much a little smarter than your average raven or dolphin: we're isolated islands of thought. so we may get glimmers of brilliance now and then, but it fades, and is trapped in our skulls, and dies with us

We'd just reinvent language. Deaf kids have done this in orphanages - without being taught.

i'm asking you to imagine us, humans, without the capacity for language. and what you get is a raven or a dolphin: inquisitive, observant, intelligent, inventive. but unable to share our thoughts, we get glimmers that fade and die with us, trapped in our skulls

what i'm trying to say is how communication, not raw intelligence, not grey matter, is what sets us apart from the dolphins and the ravens

take any of us, and remove our ability to talk or write, and we're pretty much a little smarter than your average raven or dolphin: we're isolated islands of thought. so we may get glimmers of brilliance now and then, but it fades, and is trapped in our skulls, and dies with us

And nobody considers that animals do communicate to some extent; everyone knows what the doberman is saying when he says "get the fock off my lawn or I'll eat you!"

It's not so clear what the birds or dolphins are saying to each other.

but i will assert that if we didn't have the vocal/ manual dexderity, there wouldn't be anything for evolution to "work with":

1. a few of us were able to say a little, so this gave those few an evolutionary advantage2. then a few of those who were able to say a little were able to think a little deeper, which gave those few an evolutionary advantage3. then subset of those saying a little, with a little deeper thought, in turn got able to enun

"Thought is language, language is thought" is what your trying to say. It's why a large vocabulary is an important measure of intelligence; because if you lack the words to think with, you lack the very thought.

"Thought is language, language is thought" is what your trying to say. It's why a large vocabulary is an important measure of intelligence; because if you lack the words to think with, you lack the very thought.

I had that argument in philosophy class. I do not think exclusively in language: I also think in shapes, and images, and directions, and sequences, without any verbal context.When I think about where my house is, I don't think "south by southwest" or "three streets west, two blocks south", I think 'thataway', and then translate that thought in language if I need to share it.

Babies have no words, but they have have thoughts. They want to see the flashing lights even if they have no words for lights, for flas

It's very rewarding to see someone say the same things you're thinking. Thank you for that.

Food for thought: doesn't this mean that we would have a lot to gain by trying to teach a few animals to talk? There are already hundreds of videos on youtube with cats and dogs making sounds very similar to human speach, and their enthusiastic owners will probably turn that into an evolutionary advantage ("hey, let's mate our dog with the one down the street, he can talk"). Beyond the cuteness factor, there is howeve

communication is the something that ravens, dolphins etc don't have evolutionarily (yet)

We don't know that. Obviously dolphins and ravens DO communicate; why else would birds and dolphins "sing"? The unknown is how well they communicate, and at what level of sophistication. Until we are able to decipher the whale songs and bird chirpings, we just can't know.

Remember, it took the Rosetta Stone to decipher an ancient human language. A little offtopic, but if we can't even understand humans, let alone other ea

Not to be contrary, but what does empathy have to do with intelligence?

Can you seriously not answer this by using a little introspection to examine your own thought processes? Most adults are fully capable of it, if they stop and give it some thought. Empathy is not some magical blackbox in your head that makes you feel what others feel; it's a mental model; a recognition that others are like you; a mapping of their emotions to your reaction to those emotions; an ability to recognise or even assess another's situation and apply that mapping. This all requires some intelligence, although perhaps not as much as we'd like to believe.

I'm not sure about evolution as far as ravens are concerned, but I do know nature throws us some curve balls every once in a while, and ravens are most definitely one of them.

There was some researcher visiting Fairbanks, AK when I lived there. He was trying to catch ravens for some study he was doing and needed 20 birds. After a few weeks of not catching a single one, the local newspaper caught wind of what he was doing and ran a story on him. The first paragraph explained his lack of success. He had been using cheese puffs as bait in the parking lot of the local supermarket. He had a firing net to cover the birds when they came to investigate...only they never came, even when the lot usually had ravens all over the place.

A reader finally figured it out. There was a McDonald's right next to the lot. He should have been using French Fries. The ravens knew something wasn't right and refused to touch his bait.

I've seen them open zipped containers to steal food (the cargo compartments on snow machines are easy prey)...and then CLOSE THEM.

I watched my cat carry on a 10 minute conversation with one. Obviously some sort of speech between the two...never seen anything like it before, or since.

I've heard one make the sound of dripping water, then fly down and drink from my rain barrel.

After 10 years in Alaska, I've only seen one dead raven. It had been fried on the power line above my friends truck while he was sitting in it eating his lunch. Plonk!...in the back of the truck it fell. It is so rare to find a dead raven that the Dept. of Fish and Game wanted the corpse for study.

Even with a 160F annual temperature variation, they never seem to be affected by the weather. I watched one trying how to figure out how to eat a rock-solid, 1-pound package of hamburger meat at -45F in a Sam's Club parking lot. He eventually dragged under the tail pipe of an idling car to thaw it out(people leave their cars idling while they shop when it is that cold). I know people that would never have figured that out.

I can completely understand the high reverence native cultures afford the creature.

"After 10 years in Alaska, I've only seen one dead raven. It had been fried on the power line above my friends truck while he was sitting in it eating his lunch. Plonk!...in the back of the truck it fell. It is so rare to find a dead raven that the Dept. of Fish and Game wanted the corpse for study."

yes! After years of pecking at seeds in the park, I have gained their trust. As a member of their inner circle, I am privy to their secret agenda. They took me to their secret lair, and I saw all of their evil plans. There in it with the squirrels, I'll tell you. Just watch your back!

Actually, I wrote a report about this for an Anthro class once. The advantage of "modern" humans, over homo erectus was "organization". Homo Erectus had a (20%) bigger brain (for whatever that means), massed ~20kg more than the average modern human, and was generally better established in the area.

Cro-Magnon man gathered resources and brought them to a central location, while Neanderthal went to the resources and used them there. Whether Erectus was wiped out, assimilated, or whatever, obviously organizatio

It tells us that the optimality of the tit for tat [wikipedia.org] strategy is not limited to ape communities, but can arise in other species, leading to the related phenomenon of empathy.

Some of the requirements for tit-for-tat to be optimal probably include the ability to recognize individuals and remember them, keen ability to identify (generalized) "defection", and a willingness to suffer a (short-term) loss to punish defectors, which requires some long-term historical memory. Which is to say, characteristics that persist in apes and probably ravens.

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."

A few weeks back I was driving down the road and a flock of birds flew under my truck. One of them must have hit the bottom and got hurt as it was laying and moving on the ground. As I looked in the rear view I saw another bird flying out of the grass when they flew into and it was flying around the hurt bird. There was no where to pull over as the road was tight but driving back later that day I saw the bird dead and moved towards the edge of the asphalt. But the bird that flew outlooked like is was t

So technically the score would still be: Evolution: inf. Creationism: 0

What this really shows is that empathy and as a result morality really are evolutionary constructs, that creationists are WRONG when they claim that it takes an invisible sky daddy to be moral.

It also shows that either empathy have been a desirable genetic trait for a VERY long time (at least back to the common ancestor for dinosaurs and mammals), or that the trait developed independently in multiple branches of the evolutionary process,

In Baden Baden there are plenty of crows, there are a couple that from time to time sit on a house across from ours and they kiss. Seriously, they sit there and then do what looks like kissing with their beaks.

That's strange. I can observe cats as much as I want and still see them not being like dogs.

Humans are social animals. So are dogs. Both are generally geared towards working in groups (even cats can be group animals - a lot of the big cats in Africa cooperate although they also can go solo). Not sure about ravens.

To me, it seems logical that empathy is a social behavior. Perhaps it's game theory, where helping out a fellow costs you relatively little at that moment but can net you help when you need it

The biggest breakthroughs in the history of science were not discoveries of new facts but new interpretations of what everybody already knew (but they had it wrong). Like Galileo and the Sun circling the Earth. Newton and centrifugal force.

Perhaps today's "popular science" has got it wrong, and many of our highly prized traits of human interaction are very basic things we might find across the board in all animals. That would explain a whole bunch of cross-speci

I think the point is that it IS commonly seen throughout the animal kingdom.

Really, I don't get this willingness to pretend that animals have no emotions. Anyone with a horse, dog, cat, or even a relatively unintelligent pet like a ferret has seen playfulness, companionship, affection, and many other "human" traits.

Um no, nobody is claiming that humans evolved from ravens, or vice versa. What they're saying is that empathy is a trait which apparently involved in both species, and this is an interesting finding. That's all.

True humans didn't evolve from birds but birds and humans do have a common ancestor (amphibians?). There are two possibilities here, either mammals and birds evolved the behaviour seperately or they both inherited it from a common ancestor.

Given that our last common ancestor was probably asocial and kind of dumb (like most modern amphibians and reptiles) it seems a lot more likely to be a case of convergent evolution than common inheritance.